How to Force the Doze Mode on Android Marshmallow Devices

24 May 2016

With Android Marshmallow, developers at Google launched a feature called Doze which focused on extending the battery life of the device by stopping the background processes while the phone is lying idle. However, the Doze mode will only work if the device is lying still and none of the sensors are triggered. Which means only when your phone is lying on a table, will the Doze mode stop the background processes. But if the phone is in your pocket or lying idle on the car’s dashboard, there will be no battery saving even though you are not actually using the phone.

To tackle such situations, an XDA developer came out with an app called the Force Doze which enables Doze when the screen is turned off. The app also disables the motion sensor of the device so that Doze stays active even if the device is not stationary while the screen is off. Doze will only get deactivated periodically to execute maintenance jobs (like getting notifications, etc.) and apart from that, it will stop background processes completely. This feature keeps the balance between optimizing battery life and at the same time fetching notifications from time to time.

Installing and Enabling Force Doze

Force Doze is a free app which you can install directly from the Play Store. The app works out of the box for rooted Android devices and just as you initialize the app, it will ask you for SU privileges. After the app gains root access, you can enable the app to enable force Doze. For non-rooted devices, there’s a workaround, but you will have to enable USB debugging from developers option and install ADB drivers on your computer. If you are not sure about installing ADB, here’s a simple installer that can install it on your computer in less than 15 seconds.

Once the command is executed, re-launch the Force Doze app and this time, you will need to enable the services. You can type in the command ADB Devices to check if your phone is detected by the ADB shell on Windows.

How Force Doze Works

As soon as you enable the app and turn off the display, Force Doze is set into action. This way, the device doesn’t have to wait for 30 minutes before entering Doze in order to save battery. However, if you don’t wish to enable it as soon as the screen is turned off, you can set a custom time before Force Doze is activated. In the settings menu, you can turn off force doze while the mobile is charging.

The app will show a persistent notification so that it’s not killed by the OS and is always functioning to extend the battery life. For some devices, you might have to check the option to fix auto-rotate and brightness where the sensors don’t turn on after waking up from Doze.

Option to White List Apps

Even though Force Doze has a feature where it wakes up the device to do maintenance work and fetch notifications, you can add a few priority apps in the whitelist section to hold partial wake locks and access the network to fetch notifications. With that feature, the Force Doze keeps you covered and at the same time saves battery juice.

Conclusion

I have been using Force Doze on my Xiaomi Mi 5 and I have seen some significant improvements in the battery life. The app is different from all the battery saving apps out there and the option of whitelisting apps makes sure that I get notification from priority apps right when they arrive. So yes, if you own an Android device with Marshmallow, Force Doze is definitely worth a shot.